Knowledge Base

Tutorial: Exit intent & inactivity triggers

Wouldn't it be great if you could interject when users are at critical interaction points, but they go dark or start to head out the door (think signup/purchase funnels)?

Perhaps you've been into a store, didn't make a purchase, but on your way out someone asked if you had trouble finding anything in particular...

That's what BlueConic's exit intent and inactivity listeners enable you to do! These special listeners enable you to trigger interactions with users when they exhibit intent to leave your site, or when they are inactive on a page/screen for some number of seconds.

2. Have a use case in mind, of course! A user who has shown intent by entering a purchase or signup funnel may need just a little help, or an offer, to get them through the rest of the process.

From there, you're really just steps away from being able to trigger traditional or custom BlueConic lightbox dialogues on exit intent or inactivity. Here's how it goes:

Exit intent

We'll set up an exit intent lightbox as an example for this tutorial. Head to Profiles > Listeners and click "Add Listener" to get started. You'll be presented with some options:

Give the listener a name. It may be that the listener serves multiple purposes -- we're just naming ours "Exit intent listener".

Enter a description that would allow others to understand why you've set the listener up.

Next to "Where", select the channels and pages the listener will be used for. Wondering how you select the dialogues the trigger should apply to? Good for you -- don't worry, that's handled later in the dialogue configuration!

You may want to tweak the velocity threshold and space from top settings later, if you find in testing that you'd like the listener to be more or less sensitive based on your particular site.

Once the listener has been configured, activate and save it, and we can move on to the Dialogues tab to trigger a lightbox based on exit intent.

By now you have configured a listener that will fire an event "Exit intent" whenever a visitor exhibits intent to leave a page. All that is left is for you to configure a dialogue that will be triggered by this event.

From the Dialogues tab, click "Add Dialogue".

Click [Add Dialogue], and you'll be brought straight to the "Who" tab of dialogue configuration.

Enter a name for your dialogue (e.g. "Register today"), and use the bar beneath the "Who" tab to select your audience.

Next, you have to indicate that this dialogue is supposed to trigger whenever an exit intent is detected (remember: the listener you created earlier will throw an "Exit intent" event when this happens). To do this, head over to the "When" tab and select "Show on Event" and "Exit Intent":

From there, really the rest of the configuration should follow along with the standard lightbox tutorial: create your lightbox on the "Interaction" tab.

Inactivity

Once you've seen the exit intent setup, the inactivity setup will be familiar. Head to Profiles > Listeners and click "Add Listener". Here are your options with this one

Again, we're naming the object and providing a description so that others who might come across the object in the future understand why we set it up.

We also need to define, next to "Where", which channels and pages we should be listening to inactivity for.

From there, we have just a couple options which you can tweak based on your use case. Otherwise, the dialogue configuration is exactly the same as it was for exit intent, except that the event name on the "When" tab is "Inactivity".

Hopefully this is more than enough to get you started with exit intent and inactivity triggers! Thanks for checking in!